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Abstract
This critical review essay is a chapter-by-chapter evaluation of a book
that examines the writings of Europeans about Philippine languages
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It cites the book’s
strengths, supplies counterarguments, provides clarifications, and offers
background information and additional literature. The essay speaks
highly of the book’s merits; it provides archival materials that many
scholars ‘would otherwise have had no access to’ and offers an
invaluable study on the nature, if not history, of Philippine languages.
Despite the book’s many merits, the essay notes several problems with
some of its claims and offers recommendations as to how it could
have been improved.
Introduction
MARLIES S. SALAZAR’S Perspectives on Philippine Languages:
Five Centuries of Philippine Scholarship is a very welcome addition to
scholarly publications on Philippine languages and linguistics by Marlies
S. Salazar, a Filipina who has spent many years delving into European
libraries and archives to uncover as many as possible the writings of
Europeans about the Philippines, particularly their comments about
51 (2014)
Volume 50:1
52
56 L. REID
The A ge of Disco
Age Discovv er
eryy
The first report from the Philippines was that of Antonio Pigafetta,
an Italian who accompanied Magellan around the world and survived the
massacre in Mactan in 1521 when Magellan was killed. His report contains
a list of 160 words, of which Salazar identifies 90 forms still found in
Cebuano and related languages. While she indicates that the complete
word list is given in the original language in Appendix 1 (3), only the 90
items (with supplied English and Cebuano equivalents that she was able
to identify) are given.
This chapter first reviews the contributions of various missionaries
(European, not Spanish) who came to the Philippines during this period,
including a number of German Jesuits. These include Paul Klein, who
arrived in Manila in 1678; he was a prolific writer in Tagalog and
contributor to the Tagalog dictionary that was eventually published by
Juan de Noceda and Pedro de San Lucar (1754). After the expulsion of
the Jesuits from the Philippines in 1767, many of them went to Italy,
where the Spanish Jesuit priest Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura included
information that they, his fellow Jesuits, provided in his extensive work
comparing known languages and their relationships (1785). Portions of
this work are provided in translation by Salazar. She notes that this is the
first work to define the geographical extent of what we now refer to as the
Malayo-Polynesian languages (8). Hervas discusses the similarities among
languages from Easter Island to the Marianas, Palau, Malay, Philippines,
Spanish first arrived in the Tagalog region. She also provides us with
transliterated (from Cyrillic) and translated lists of the 285 Philippine
language ter ms appearing in Pallas’s (1789) volume for Tagalog,
Pampangan, and Magindanao. The great majority of these terms are for
Magindanao, all of which were collected from “travelers.” Salazar has
done a careful analysis of the sources of Alter’s word list of Tagalog included
in the Appendix (236–238), and of the forms themselves; she notes that
Alter’s lack of knowledge of Spanish resulted in mistaken readings of
various Spanish letters. Adelung’s contribution came in the form of
grammatical notes on Tagalog and Bisayan extracted from Spanish (and
other) materials that were available to him (listed and commented on by
Salazar). Adelung also did a grammatical analysis of three different versions
of the Lord’s Prayer in Tagalog. One of these versions was based on a
copy translated into German by Hervas. Adelung did the same for Bisayan.
Salazar surveys the key figures who contributed to the development
of the field now known as Historical-Comparative Linguistics, including
William Jones, Francis Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Bopp,
Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, August Pott, August Schleicher, Friedrich Diez,
Johann Zeuss, Franz von Miklosich, Karl Brugmann and Berhold Delbrüch.
Of these, she focuses on von Humboldt (40–79) and discusses his extensive
contributions to the then-current understanding of the structure of Tagalog
and its position in relation to other related languages. Salazar claims that
his work is of great importance for the history of linguistics “because it is the
first complete scientific treatment of the Malayo-Polynesian language family”
(74). It should be noted that ‘Malayo-Polynesian’ is a term that Humboldt
didn’t use, preferring the name ‘Malayan’ (it was Bopp who first used the
name ‘maleisch-polynesisch’ in 1841). While it is true that Humboldt
compared the sounds and structures of languages as far apart as Malagasy
and Polynesian, he had not grasped the importance of discovering recurrent
sound change (or ‘sound laws’) as the basis for determining the relationship
between languages. Typological similarities between grammatical structures,
although a by-product of the relationship, can never be used as a basis for
establishing the relationship, since such similarities can and do arise
Schadenberg, Joseph Montana, and Hans Meyer. In the latter are Armand
de Quatrefages de Bréau, Aristide Marre, Hendrik Kern, Jan Brandes,
Johann Jonker, and Ferdinand Blumentritt. For each of these authors, Salazar
details relevant biographical information, outlining the context in which
they became interested in Philippine languages and how they acquired
the data that they used in their publications.
Of those who actually spent time in the Philippines and gathered
linguistic data during their stay, one of the most prominent was Meyer.
Salazar includes in her Appendix some of the lists that he published. These
include Tiruray and Magindanao forms that were apparently given to
Meyer by an unnamed Jesuit priest who claimed to speak the languages.
The priest apparently wrote out the forms for Meyer as they are listed in
Spanish orthography, while the Sulu language lists, and the Negrito
language material that he may have elicited himself, are not given using
Spanish orthographic conventions. Salazar states that after hunting for
possibly similar forms in Schlegel’s (1971) Tiruray lexicon and in Aldave-
Yap’s (1997) comparative study, she found “only one word in five” that
resembled modern Tiruray and that therefore the list is not very reliable
(99). She apparently did not consult Schlegel’s dictionary because most of
the forms given by Mayer are found in his lexicon. Perhaps she could
have benefited from a deeper evaluation of Aldave-Yap’s data in that it
clearly misrepresents the phonology of the language. In the list given from
Aldave-Yap, the letter i is used in all forms that have a central vowel
represented in Schlegel and in Meyer’s list by the letter e, an orthographic
convention commonly still found today in languages, such as Ilokano and
Pangasinan, that retain the original central vowel pronunciation. The
spelling in Aldave-Yap appears to be a printer’s substitution for what was
probably an ‘i-bar’ (/i/) in the original (printer substitution errors are a
major problem throughout the book in question). Thus, the Tiruray word
for “fire” is not afiy as cited by Salazar from Aldave-Yap, but afey, as given
in Schlegel, which he lists as synonymous with ferayag, the term given by
Meyer as frayague. Similarly, the word given for “water” is not riguwas,
but reguwas, which Schlegel defines as “a poetical term for water.” Schlegel
also gives the expected term wayeg that is clearly the form represented by
Meyer’s vayeque. While Meyer gives wefuruje for “air,” Schlegel shows
refuruh, “a wind,” as well as labanen, “wind,” which Salazar cites (from
Aldave-Yap) as labangin. Meyer’s term for “earth,” fantade, is also found
in Schlegel as fantad, with a meaning similar to tuna that she cites from
Aldave-Yap. It is not possible to determine the source of the final letter e
found on fantade, although it is probably the paragogic vowel /e/ that is
added to all consonant final words in the Tomini-Tolitoli languages of
northern Sulawesi, such as Donde pantade “shore, beach” (Himmelmann
1991). This is an area south across the Celebes Sea from where Tiruray is
spoken; there was surely trade contact between them. It is also found in
Meyer’s list on dogote, “sea”; and the pronouns beene, “he,”; begueye,
“we”; ocgome, “you”; and berrone, “they.” The forms to which the extra
vowel is attached can clearly be associated with the current Tiruray forms.
One other fact that apparently evaded Salazar was that Meyer apparently
misread some original w letters as n and in one case m. So that telen,
“three” is telew; fiten, “seven” is fitew; nalem, “eight” is walew; and sioon,
“nine” is siyow. The form for “three,” given as tires in Aldave-Yap, is not
Tiruray; it is clearly a borrowing of Spanish tres that she did not recognize.
Meyer also lived among the Negritos of the west coast of Luzon
and published copiously on them. Salazar includes in her Appendix Meyer’s
lists of forms from two of the languages he researched. It is curious, given
today’s knowledge of the distinct Ayta languages of Zambales, that she
states, “Meyer did not see the similarities of the Negrito dialects with
Tagalog and Kapampangan. He created the myth of a separate language
of the Negritos, which was hotly discussed for a long time” (102). While it
is true that the Ayta languages have borrowed from the languages of their
Sambalic neighbors, and possibly also from Kapampangan and Tagalog,
they are very different from either of these languages in lexicon, syntax,
morphology, and phonology. The question was whether their languages
were part of the Malayo-Polynesian language family, or not.
Salazar then discusses the contributions of Schadenberg, briefly
outlining some of the places where he lived and worked and some of the
research expeditions he made, including the one that took him to ‘Guinaan’
in the ‘Gran Cordillera Central,’ where he collected 700 words. It should
be noted that there are two barrios with the name ‘Guinaang,’ one in
Lubuagan, Kalinga, the other in Bontoc, Mountain Province (see Reid
Ongoing). It is the former that he visited, reaching it from ‘Banao, Abra.’
Salazar provides in her Appendix the lists that Schadenberg took of three
Ayta languages, one simply called ‘Negrito’; the others from Caulaman
and Dinalupihan in Bataan. She also discusses his work in relation to the
wide interest in these peoples among European scholars at the time.
Of those who wrote about the Philippines but never succeeded in
traveling there, Salazar focuses on the work of the Dutch scholars Hendrik
Kern, his student Brandes, and Blumentritt. Kern was also involved in
the discussion raised by Meyer and by Schadenberg about the languages
spoken by Negritos. Kern claimed that they were closely related to Tagalog,
and were not different languages. He did, however, note that the lexicon,
phonology, and grammar showed them to be Malayo-Polynesian
languages. So the primary issue, and one that was not made clear either in
the original works (or by Salazar), was not whether Negritos had distinct
languages, which they clearly did despite their borrowed forms. Rather, it
was a question of whether their languages could be shown to be part of
the same family (Malayo-Polynesian) to which Tagalog belonged or whether
they retained anything of their pre-Malayo-Polynesian tongues. This was
an issue that interested Wilhelm Schmidt (see below), and continues to be
of interest (Reid 1994).
The role of Brandes and Kern in the development of our
understanding of the relationships between the sound systems of Malayo-
Polynesian languages goes somewhat beyond the facts given by Salazar.
A better summary may be found in Blust (2009[2013], 522–523). One
contribution that Brandes made that many modern Philippine linguists
should take seriously is that the infix -in- is not a marker of a ‘passive’
verb, but is a marker of ‘completed action.’ Although not obvious in
Tagalog because of the morphological changes that have taken place with
‘actor voice’ constructions in which it has disappeared (in the case of verbs
with -um-) (Reid 1992), or alternates with m- (in the case of ma-, mag-
and mang- verbs), the presence of -in- in the verbs of such constructions
in a wide range of other Philippine languages shows that Brandes was
right despite Kern’s objections. The infix -in- is now reconstructed to very
early stages of the Austronesian family as a marker of perfective aspect,
not as a ‘passive’ affix.
relate most of them to the same subgroup that their neighbors’ languages
belong to, they are distinct from them in many ways.
Brandstetter, without ever visiting any region where an Austronesian
language was spoken, made major contributions to the state of knowledge
of Austronesian languages and their relationships. Salazar indicates these
accomplishments in her fourteen-page discussion of his writings. Her
summary of his general contributions are useful, but in accord with the
purpose of her research, she focuses on Brandstetter’s writings in relation
to Philippine languages, especially the essay in which he compared
Malagasy and Tagalog. This article and several of his others are available
in English translation, as Salazar notes (see Brandstetter 1916). An excellent
evaluation of Brandstetter’s contributions to the field of Austronesian
linguistics is available in Blust (2009 [2013], 523–528, see also Blust and
Schneider 2012). Careless copying or poor editing mars the material that
is taken from the original sources that Salazar provides. Thus, the claim
that Brandstetter always wrote ‘n ’ for ‘ng ’ is very misleading (158), because
.
he actually wrote ‘n ’ for ‘ng ’. Likewise, for the phonetic system of Original
Indonesian (162), Brandstetter shows the final ‘e’ of the six vowels as ‘ë ’[ ],
e
(Blagden’s translation of Brandstetter [1916] gives ‘e ’); the velar ‘n. ’ is ‘n ’
[ ]; the palatal ‘n ’ is ñ ; and the line that contains ‘y, l, r ’ is missing the
bilabial semivowel w.
Several pages are devoted to the publications of Rudolph Kern on
certain morphological features of Philippine languages. These include
another misguided attempt to prove that the perfective infix -in- is a passive
affix, and a summary of the functions of the ka- prefix, to which he added
“ka is sometimes added to the imperative to give it some urgency: Lakad ka
na? ‘Go now!’” This is cited by Salazar, but she doesn’t note that Kern failed
to recognize that this particular ka is a second person singular pronoun, or
that imperatives in Austronesian languages typically encode the agent, unlike
European languages. Gonda’s contributions, especially in the area of Tagalog
terms that apparently have their source in Sanskrit, are summarized by Salazar
with the note that “[l]ike most Sanskrit scholars, Gonda has a tendency to
emphasize the influence of Sanskrit on other languages and cultures” (177).
The major European linguist of this era who utilized data from
Philippine languages in his comparison of Austronesian languages was
Otto Dempwolff. His contributions are discussed and evaluated by Salazar
(177–185), who credits his work as being “unequaled in its scholarly and
thorough approach. It has been the starting point of all later research in
this area” (184). This, of course, is very true in comparison with preceding
work, and his publications have provided the foundation upon which
subsequent scholars such as Dahl, Dyen, Wolff, Zorc, and Blust have built
their careers. But his work was not without problems, as Blust notes in his
extensive examination of Dempwolff ’s work (2009[2013], 528–543).
Salazar, noting that Dempwolff ’s major work is an “extremely useful source
for research in comparative Austronesian linguistics” (185), lists the English
translations that have appeared in the Philippines over the years. But Blust
notes, “[u]nfortunately, no good English translation of Dempwolff ’s major
work exists to date… A full (uncredited) translation of VLAW was issued
in mimeographed form by the Ateneo de Manila University in 1971, but
this is so riddled with errors that the beginning student is best advised to
avoid it” (2009[2013], 542). It would have also been useful to acknowledge
that even though Dempwolff had reconstructed over 2000 lexical items to
his “Uraustronesisch,” or what today is called Proto-Malayo-Polynesian,
Blust reconstructed twice as many additional forms, a large number of
which are cited with reflexes in Philippine languages (Blust and Trussel
Ongoing). Finally, the problems that were noted above with the
representation of Brandstetter’s Original Indonesian are replicated in the
listing of Dempwolff ’s Proto-Indonesian (181). Thus, the vowels are
missing (schwa); the laryngeals show ‘c ’ for the ‘spiritus asper’ or light
e
glottal closure that Dempwolff represented with the superscript c; the
(misaligned) retroflex symbols ‘d ’, ‘t ’, and ‘l ’, should all have subscript
. .t, and .l, respectively; of the palatals, ‘g ’ ’ and ‘k ’ ’ are misaligned
periods, d,
and n is missing its accent mark, n’ ; the velar is also given as ‘n ’; and the
velar fricative is shown as ‘j ’. Similar problems exist in the listing of the
twelve homorganic nasal combinations, and Salazar does not list the four
diphthongs that Dempwolff considered to be part of the sound system.
Recent De
Devv elopments in Philippine Linguistics in Eur ope
Europe
In this chapter, Salazar reviews the work of a wide range of European
scholars whose studies in the second half of the twentieth century include
Philippine language materials. They include the comparativists Andre-
George Haudricourt (France), Hans Mohring (Germany), and Otto
Christian Dahl (Norway). She then groups together linguists from separate
European countries: Russia: Sergey Bulich, Evgeny Polivanov, Natalya
Alieva, Vladimir Makarenko, Ivan Podberezskij, Lina Shkarban, Grennady
Rachkov, Maria Stanyukovich; France: Maurice Coyaud, Jean-Paul Potet,
François Dell, and Nicole Revel; Germany: Heinrich Kelz, Werner
Drossard, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Agnes Kolmer, and Ursula Wegmüller;
and finally Holland: Karl Alexander Adelaar and Antoon Postma. Many
of these scholars visited the Philippines for various periods, and many of
them, especially those from Russia, were primarily interested in Tagalog.
Others such as Revel, widely known for her work on Palawan; Stanyukovich
for her work on the hudhud epic genre of Ifugao; and Postma for his
studies on Hanunóo and its pre-Spanish writing system, have spent
extended periods in remote places in the Philippines and have contributed
greatly to our understanding of otherwise little-known languages.
Conclusion
Salazar has done an invaluable service to all linguists interested
in Philippine languages by utilizing her skills as a polyglot and translator
to reveal to us material that many of us would otherwise have had no
access to. Of keen interest to this reviewer, for example, are the
comments interspersed throughout the book on early views about who
the Negritos are and the nature of the languages that they speak, and
the lists of Negrito forms given in the Appendix that were taken by
Meyer and by Schadenberg. This is material that could have been
referred to in Reid (2013), but which were unavailable to me. But the
frequent use by Salazar of the term ‘dialect’ for ‘language’ especially
when it refers to a language spoken by Negritos (85, 93, 149, etc.) was,
for me, problematic.
While at various points Salazar indicates where modern scholarship
provides a different analysis or provides explanations for phenomena
that puzzled early European researchers, these are scattered and
incomplete. The work would have been greatly improved if she had
been more careful to evaluate the contributions of writers in the light of
modern scholarship. For example, while Brandstetter (and others)
discussed the widespread presence of what have been referred to as
monosyllabic ‘roots’ in Austronesian languages, she does not mention
Blust (1980), who examined the nature of the phenomenon, critically
evaluated Brandstetter’s methods, and reconstructed some 230 roots
based on 2,560 tokens in 117 Austronesian languages, of which 32 are
Philippine languages.
Another area in which Salazar could have provided some evaluative
comments is the commonly occurring reference to what were called
“passives” in Philippine languages, and which today are typically referred
to as syntactically transitive constructions with different “focus” or “voice”
marking on the verb. It is striking that even though she (123) cited a very
relevant passage from Marre’s (1901) Grammar of Tagalog, which discussed
the nature of Tagalog ‘passives,’ she did not associate the statement with
what today is widely understood as the basis for the difference between
the accusativity of European languages and the ergativity of Philippine
languages.
If one had to give the reason for this curious difference, one could find
it in two completely opposed points of view, from which the action
expressed by the verb is considered. In the European languages the
action is seen in relation to the person who does it, whereas the
Malayo-Polynesian languages consider the action in relation to the
person or the thing that receives or undergoes it. (Marre 1901, 573)
Ref
efee rrences
ences
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Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Blust, Robert A. 2009 [2013]. Austronesian languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. [2013
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Blust, Robert A. and Jürg Schneider, eds. 2012. A world of words: Revisiting the work of
Renward Brandstetter (1860-1942) on Lucerne and Austronesia. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Blust, Robert A. and Steve Trussel. Ongoing. Austronesian comparative dictionary. http://
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Brandstetter, Renward. 1916. An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays by
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Taal-, Land en Volkenjunde 53]. The Hague.
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languages.”Oceanic Linguistics 31(1): 65–91.
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languages.” Oceanic Linguistics 33(1): 37–72.
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commonly occurring forms in Philippine languages.”Oceanic Linguistics 41: 295–309.
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